Useful Links: History of HTML, end of life for print?, social media and recorded history, slowblogging, and Useful Links in general

HTML History on the ESW Wiki at the w3.org site may be useful to teachers. I can’t find any explanation of what ESW means, but the wiki purpose is

for connecting the people who make the specs with the people who build on them. Pages here have no formal status but may have WikiConsensus. Questions & answers here may be misleading, or just plain wrong. Or, they may be useful.

There’s an RSS feed.

PC Magazine Goes Web Only. It started  in 1982. The last print issue will be Jan. 09. This is on the heels of similar announcements from US News and World Report and Christian Science Monitor. The times, they are a changin’.

5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History by Ben Parr at Mashable talks about how the plethora of available information created by social media will change recorded history. One of his conclusions:

It’s often said that history is recorded by the victors. Now history is recorded by computers and anybody can pick up that data and come to their own conclusion. The study of history will dramatically change as more and more people use and rely upon social media for daily interaction. No diary, history book, or recording can compare to the data available through social media. My belief is that social media may prove to be as pivotal as the printing press in the study of history.

Haste, Scorned. Blogging at a Snail’s Pace about a movement toward slowblogging. Slowbloggers post less and think more deeply. One comment really struck me as significant:

Technology is partly to blame. Two years ago, if a writer wanted to share a link or a video with friends or tell them about an upcoming event, he or she would post the information on a blog. Now it’s much faster to type 140 characters in a Twitter update (also known as a tweet), share pictures on Flickr, or use the news feed on Facebook. By comparison, a traditional blogging program like WordPress can feel downright glacial.

In evaluating my own blogging habits in light of the paragraph just quoted, I thought about my Useful Links posts. These really are a kind of mental bookmarking process for me, a way to keep what I want to remember here in one place. But I’m using Tumblr to store links I know I’ll want to return to for one reason or another. I’m using StumbleUpon to share links to pages that I think are excellent and worthy of notice by others. I’m using Twitter to share links and stay in contact with people. Should these useful links posts be retired from service? Are they at the end of life just like the print magazines mentioned earlier?

Are these posts of useful links only useful to me, or do you find them helpful as well?

3 thoughts on “Useful Links: History of HTML, end of life for print?, social media and recorded history, slowblogging, and Useful Links in general”

  1. FWIW – I subscribe to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which is to publish on the Web only beginning with the next issue. Pity, I usually enjoy it while riding the subway.

    ESW – English-speaking world, perhaps?

  2. No, I actually quite enjoy reading peoples’ shared links on their blogs, while I don’t like Twitter at all and only have people I know from RL on facebook. I think blogs are a great way of sharing information with total strangers – I wouldn’t interact with most people on my blog feeds any other way than through their blog.

    Keep posting those links, I find them interesting 🙂

    Daves last blog post.. Tweeting? I just don’t get it

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